Saturday, July 9, 2016

War is all about taking sides: it involves both fighting against an enemy and defending the target of that enemy. But when political correctness prevents an accurate identification of either side, the line that divides them is blurred, and “winning” becomes an impossibility.

Secretary of State John Kerry was reluctant to even call the present conflict with ISIS a war.

Our enemy is one that President Obama has not been willing to describe succinctly. Neither, essentially, has Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, who recently admitted his own disinterest in the issue of accurate descriptions in his department’s strategy documents.

But this administration’s conception of the enemy’s target -- the one that we’re supposed to be defending and protecting -- should concern us even more.

Targets worthy of the protection of our armed forces, one would think, should be the United States, our allies, innocent civilians, and the ideas of freedom, liberty and democracy.

A real and dangerous enemy would certainly have those exact targets clearly in its sights.

However when pressed, that’s not the answer given by our leaders. Of course they talk about protecting our citizens, but rarely without placing much emphasis on defending something else entirely.

Back in September of 2014 during Congressional questioning on Obama’s ISIS strategy, Kerry struggled to find the words to assure us that this “war” we are in (“if you care about what you call it”) is against “an enemy of Islam.”

Similarly, former British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a debate over attacking ISIS in Syria last December, said this: “Far from an attack on Islam, we are engaged in a defense of Islam.”

Two world leaders, both emphasizing that we are fighting against ISIS, which they repeatedly tell us is not Islamic and is an enemy of Islam, in order to defend Islam.

(Just imagine if either Kerry or Cameron were to assert that we were at war against an enemy of Christianity and/or to defend Christianity.)

Note the thing neither emphasized as needing defending: our ideology of freedom and liberty against one that recognizes neither. Then again, none of our leaders will admit that Islam with its political manifestation in sharia law represents a dangerous ideological opponent. Nor will the left face the fact that sharia is a “direct mortal threat” to virtually every one of its “values.”

Instead, our leaders assert that Islam is religion of peace and that ISIS does not speak for it, but instead follows a “perversion” and “gross distortion” of Islam.

If so, then do nations with governments that carry out, on a regular basis, human rights atrocities under their Islamic (sharia) laws also pervert Islam?

Our supposedly “moderate” partner of Saudi Arabia, reminds Andrew McCarthy, governs with sharia law. It routinely beheads, stones, flogs, and amputates. “Such cruel -- but not at all unusual -- punishments are designed to enforce a societal system that…degrades and dehumanizes women, while subjecting apostates and homosexuals to death and non-Muslims to systematic discrimination.”

These are examples of actions carried out not by “extremists” whom we are told do not speak for Islam, but as a routine matter of sharia law by Islamic governments.

Following Benghazi, a Center for Security Policy (“CSP”) panel reached this alarming consensus: that the entire Middle East is rapidly unifying and heading toward a strict application of sharia, a totalitarian form of government incompatible with American ideas of freedom.

Frank Gaffney, president of CSP, warns that the focus of our efforts must not remain exclusively on terrorism, but on the wider global jihad movement pushed by Sharia-supremacists.

Jihad is actually part of sharia law. A participant in the panel, Diana West, in her groundbreaking book American Betrayal, noted and thoroughly supported (as have many other experts) this conclusion: “Islamic terrorists are not ‘hijacking’ Islamic law (sharia) when they engage in jihad. On the contrary, they are executing it. Nor are they ‘twisting’ the foundational principles of Islam as codified in each and every authoritative Islamic source. They are exemplifying them.”

Since sharia is the law of the religion that Obama insists we must protect and defend, how he views sharia becomes a valid question.

We know how Obama regards his responsibility regarding Islam. He told us in his early days in office in his Cairo speech that it was “to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

In 2012 before the UN, Obama said, “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

(Note that according to authoritative Islamic law sources, “slander” includes “anything Muslims perceive to reflect badly on Islam and its prophet, including the truth.”)

Essentially, then, Obama felt it his job as Commander-in-Chief to defend Islam against attacks by negative stereotypes and slander.

It certainly seems those sentiments have been the motivation behind Obama’s actions (and inaction) as well as the words he uses. More telling, those feelings appear to be behind the words he doesn’t use.

Obama repeatedly insists that we are not, nor will we ever be, in a war against Islam. Instead, he has us in a war defending it from words and potential association with terrorists -- and by extension, protecting its political embodiment in sharia law.

But sharia law and our ideas of freedom, liberty and democracy, at a minimum, are incompatible, if not outright enemies. As Andrew Bostom has noted, most Americans get this.

So do Muslim terrorists. Ask any Muslim terrorist what or whom they consider their enemy. They would definitely not answer Islam. (That was the part of “Islamic soldier” Mateen’s 911 calls the administration tried to censor.)

Then ask Muslims around the world whether they “sympathize with the goals or tactics of terrorist groups -- or both.” According to polls summarized by Ben Shapiro, the answer from more than Obama's “tiny faction” reveals a much different answer than the bromides offered by Obama, Kerry and Cameron. As Raymond Ibrahim has noted, even the Egyptian university that co-hosted Obama’s Cairo speech, Al Azhar, refuses to denounce ISIS as “un-Islamic.”

Finally, ask a Muslim (especially one from a predominately Muslim country) or a Muslim terrorist whom or what they consider an ally. The Muslim (according to reputable polls) would likely answer sharia. So would the Muslim terrorist.

But such facts don’t inform Obama’s war strategy, which appears to consist of: attacking, sometimes, certain targets of Obama’s choosing; and along with the assistance of the media complex, Obama has the US defending the prophet of Islam, Islam, and sharia law against negative facts and stereotyping.